Err? All the highest end cards still come in AGP. You don't -have- to upgrade everything to upgrade your video card. If I were making the switch to PCI express and a new video card, I'd just buy a new computer honestly
Yes, and still carry the same hefty price tag..
However, the industry seems to be pushing their PCI-X cards, so that they can :
a) Pump the industry up, sell more chipsets
b) Sell more cards, specifically with their SLI implementation you can find here.
Which basically means, more $$$ out of your pocket to keep up. The SLI looks promising, and delivers numbers to what you'd expect using 2 PCI express video cards at once. And I understand you don't -have- to upgrade to the PCI-X, but when we're talking about games, every little bit counts. Most of these brand new spanking cards see PCI-X first, and are trickling down to AGP now. I believe the industry will shift from AGP to PCI-X just like it did when the AGP slots were first introduced. It sure as hell is pushing for the change.
Why bother to couple GeForce GPUs with the Macs, if you aren't going to bother to utilize that power for games? It makes no sense. That's like buying a Ferrari just to drive to church every sunday.
I see a lot of comments already about how the Macs cost a lot..
Let me pose this question to those people then - with the recent changes in the industry, who is really paying more? The Mac users or the Windows users? Any high end card nowadays comes in PCI Express, which almost certainly requires you to buy a new motherboard, and possibly a new processor, on top of that $200-$400 card. Gaming definitely knows how to suck that money out of your wallet quicker than any Mac will.
Windows users are allowed to play more , but we pay the price for it. I suppose it's a necessary evil in order to enjoy gaming at its finest..
I read tons of geek message boards (go figure), as well as car enthusiast sites. I tune my Celica, read all kinds of boards, and I'm a CS student. So, I get to see the differences of the sub-cultures first hand. I have gearhead friends, and computer geek friends.
They are ONE IN THE SAME - believe me. The faster the better, and whoever has the best & biggest toys win.
You may write code or be an admin to prove to the world how smart you are. The tuner guys drive fast to prove to the world how fast they are.
The only difference between these two groups of people, is that they use different machines in seperate ways to express individuality & creativity. Otherwise, tuning a car properly, or maintaining a nice sized network / program are exactly the same thing.
So game publishers, stop overpromising. Let your games sell themselves, instead of your PR representatives. Have some faith in the developers talents, just like in the old days. Yes, your game may sell well, but when expectations aren't met you can expect the sequel not to do so well.
I'm suprised with the mention of all these games (San Andreas/HL2/Halo2/Doom3), not one of these people brought up anything about piracy, which has run rampant with 90% of the titles mentioned. I couldn't imagine having a more negative impact upon business then seeing your stolen, TOP SECRET, un-hyped product being passed around for free.
But then again, I suppose if a leak were controlled, it would be one hell of a PR stunt. Conspiracy theories, anyone?
7 hours is a bit excessive for anything (LOTR anyone?), but i'd probably still watch the whole thing.
I've sat & watched xmodem downloads for longer, dammit. At least all of us who used boards did gain one benefit from it - patience.
1. redial
2. connect
3. download, logoff at 11:59pm
4. redial @ 12:01am
5. connect
6. use fresh file credits for more downloading
7. play newly acquired 4mb shareware game
In case you guys don't understand the significance of RaD Man posting this story, he leads the ACiD artwork group. ACiD was the biggest, and best, ansi art group back in the day. They had distro's all over the world at one point, and if you had original ACiD art on your board, you were leet.
I miss the BBS days. There was something appealing to me about playing B.R.E, L.O.R.D, Barneysplat, posting FIDOnet messages, and trying to figure out ways to scam the upload/download credit system. Bulletin boards definately helped inspire some of the basic fundamental utilities we have on the internet today - message boards, games, file transfers, we had it all.
It really was some of the best times i've ever had with a computer, period. I'm only 24 and this is literally part of my childhood. I urge any old sysops, or anyone who is curious to check out the BBS Documentary website for more nostalgia & information.
A credit to Jon Stewart.. he's a funny guy. But it really does say something about the current state of our media, when a satirical news show host is considered a political correspondant.
Although.. knowing the way my country works, I wouldn't be suprised if he becomes a governer, or the president, in less than 8 years. His running mate? Lewis Black.
They'd get my vote. We may as well have our kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.
Re:Is anyone else torn between...
on
Half Life 2 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 3, Informative
...using Steam to get HL2 vs. buying it retail? If I recall correctly you can only get the package that includes the Source rework of HL1 via online purchase and I *really* want that, but I still don't like the idea of dropping $50 or so on a game and not getting anything physical to hang on to. I know it's old-fashioned, but I still like having a backup copy to hang on to just in case my drive dies or something.
Amen to the "I want tangible stuff" comment. Check out this post for a solution. Basically, you'll have to archive all of the \steamapps folder with winrar, and back it up on DVD/CD. About 2 1/2 DVD's or a fsckload of CD's are your options.
Re:What the hell does "gone/going gold" mean?
on
Half Life 2 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Terminology used when software is burned onto a "gold" cd that will be sent to the CD manufacturers to be reproduced. So named because of the CDR burnable CDs are gold backed normally. Also See Going Glass.
..is all speculation. This is yesterdays news, and hasn't involved an official PR by Valve or Vivendi. As much as I would like this to be true, there aren't any facts to substantiate it.
Between playing CS:Source and reading the steampowered.com forums, I'd be amazed that it will be available for a November release.
There are tons of bugs, exploits, and cheats going around any CS:Source (HL2 powered) servers. IMHO, it looks like they really rushed CS out the door, and it's pissed off a lot of steam subscribers. I should only hope with the official gold announcement comes a big patch to address the many issues they've already got.
I'm not sure if the above link is the same trailer, but it's still good. The two links submitted in the article aren't even pumping out 10kb/sec @ 8am on a sunday morning.
Well, with these kind of statistics, he'll be gainfully employed for years to come.
While he believes his job is important, Rush doesn't take the role of Internet cop too seriously. But he admits with a chuckle that his favorite computer game at the moment is called City of Heroes.
I'd sit back all day and play CoH, and tell my boss "Sure, I killed off 800 spammers today. But 30,000 more popped up. Guess I'll be seeing you monday."
I decided to check out Mozilla for the first time in quite some while.. I'm sitting here playing with font settings, not even 5 minutes in to the browser, and this story is listed.
The guy is going to cave over something like this? Fuck that, tell them to bring it.
What if it was a legitimate company? Software vendor? Would he still do the same, if he had received a death threat? If this gets to him, he obviously doesn't understand that doing business can result in ugliness like this. Still, I wouldn't let a taped note by an anonymous person dictate the way I conduct business. It's not like the man is running a web based puppy killing service, folks.
I'm not much of an original Star Trek fan, I was born in 1980.. But I've never seen such a positive response from slashdot for one single person like this. Honestly, i've seen a few trolls here and there, but people honestly do respect and treasure this man. Too bad Scotty can't read these slashdot postings. Good luck to him and his family, I'm sure we'll enjoy his prior work for years to come.
On a lighter note.. My favorite spoof of Star Trek, has to be this T-shirt I saw once. It had a B&D clad Vulcan woman on it, with the words "Beat me up, Scotty" right next to it. Good stuff. The writers of Trek were obviously on on to something good.. or at least, on something.
Can this be confirmed that the game has already been CRACKED before it's been released?
Mod this guy up, if this isn't bullshit. I'd blow the points on you but i've already posted in the thread...
... that this isn't an indication of things to come. If you think about it, Steam's entire purpose is based off of bandwidth. Since we're all slashdotters, we're used to destroying a server to oblivion. Instead of the victim being some lowly tech page with a geeky story, this is Valve's bread & butter. It's pretty sad when they're already mired in demand over this pre-load, can you imagine opening day?
I stole the following link from bluesnews' forums, you may want to check it out as an alternative source of getting this HL2 load. Half Life 2 Cache Although, I have absolutely no idea how to inject this in to Steam, it may be an alternative for you bleeding edge gamers that have to have this NOW - even though you can't play it.
I'm torn between buying this at the store (If I can even get a copy) or getting the pre-load off of Steam (If they can even supply it). On top of all of this, I sure hope the actual servers they use for people activating CD keys on opening day is up to par. Otherwise, you're going to have a lot of pissed off gamers.
Supposed release date is September 2nd. I expect to see all of you there, or I will be confiscating geek status from you.
.. or it's been my complete ignorance of XP knowledge. For some strange reason, during SP2 installation, the installer would complain about atapi.sys being in use, and it couldn't backup the file. I figured "okay, probably an issue with a drive or virtual drive on my system". So, I uninstalled Daemon Tools/Nero/ Alcohol 120% (all of which use those virtual drives for emulation) and it still gave me the same error. Even in safe mode, windows refuses to give access to this file, citing that it's currently in use.
So, if you use any of the above mentioned programs, beware. This update will probably not bode well with the virtual devices on the system. You do have the option to skip the file, and continue the SP2 installation. It did go off without a hitch - besides finding that MSOBMAIN.DLL(read: M$ XP activation utility), is apparently corrupted and now i've got 16kb of bad sectors on my disk. Hearing two CLUNKS followed by my drive spinning up, isn't something I was welcoming during a service pack installation.
Although, SP2 does speed up explorer a little bit, and I've disabled all the annoying fud from the security center. It runs pretty good. No complaints.
Not looking for karma here, just warning you guys of a potential conflict if you're planning on rolling this out on your home machine. I don't think D-Tools/Nero/Alcohol 120% is used too often in a corporate environment.
Personally, I think it was a great game, with technology that will be in most if not all the games in the future.
Remember how many games have used the quake engine, too. At least a dozen come to mind. Even Half Life, as I understand it, uses a modified quake engine as it's base. I hope iD continues to make games, and set trends in the gaming industry. It's unfortunate that all of their titles have been first person shooters.. I think a genre change would definately garner success for them.
These games drive the hardware industry, as well. I specifically remember hearing something on the internet to the effect of - "Nvidia tailors their cards around what carmack wants in his toolbox." If that isn't influence, I don't know what is.
If you guys dig this, you may also get in to NPRQuake which takes quake 1, and turns it in to sketch art. It works on the shareware Q1 client, and doesn't require the amount of user intervention that this MS project does.
Re:original KaZaA had spyware, right?
on
P2P vs. The Clones
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Doesn't the original KaZaA client have it's own spyware? I don't see a reason to cry over someone robbing a company of spyware revenue in favor of their own spyware revenue. Now, if someone robs the client to remove the spyware altogether (like KaZaA Lite supposedly did), I'm all for that.
Kazaa came bundled with a client for BDE which was used to sell your spare cpu cycles to someone else. Basically like a huge distributed computing project, that the end user had absolutely no idea about.. I believe this single act kick-started the whole anti-adware/spyware movement.
I'd recommend using KazaaLite K++, which has removed all of the extra FUD. Although, good luck finding a legitimate download. 98% of the files on Kazaa are fakes, planted by the RIAA to dissuade you from downloading music. In the end, it is not going to matter what client you use, if all of the files on the network are bogus.
I'm not one to nitpick, but perhaps the reason you've been bombarded with spam is the fact that you freely post your email address without any sort of protection.
For example.. lets say my address is monkey@asdfgbe.com. A bot would be able to pick this up in a heartbeat, (they use google, as well as search various news sites such as slashdot) and add me to a spam list. Now, had I chose monkey@@@asdfgbe.c o m, a spam script would have a problem parsing that as a real address, and it would be rejected. Do you get what I'm saying?
I also notice that your page has a direct link to another email address, you may want to append the same junk characters to that, to circumvent the junk email. You should check in the slashdot options under the comment section, and select "show your email address with random SPAM-armoring applied (this changes weekly)".
Mod me OT if you wish, I'm trying to help this guy understand the fundamentals of how some spam actually works.
Slashdot Mirror
However, the industry seems to be pushing their PCI-X cards, so that they can :
I meant Nvidia... whoops! Ati also has a plethora of cards out there in PCI-Xpress form..
Err? All the highest end cards still come in AGP. You don't -have- to upgrade everything to upgrade your video card. If I were making the switch to PCI express and a new video card, I'd just buy a new computer honestly
Yes, and still carry the same hefty price tag..
However, the industry seems to be pushing their PCI-X cards, so that they can :
a) Pump the industry up, sell more chipsets
b) Sell more cards, specifically with their SLI implementation you can find here.
Which basically means, more $$$ out of your pocket to keep up. The SLI looks promising, and delivers numbers to what you'd expect using 2 PCI express video cards at once. And I understand you don't -have- to upgrade to the PCI-X, but when we're talking about games, every little bit counts. Most of these brand new spanking cards see PCI-X first, and are trickling down to AGP now. I believe the industry will shift from AGP to PCI-X just like it did when the AGP slots were first introduced. It sure as hell is pushing for the change.
Why bother to couple GeForce GPUs with the Macs, if you aren't going to bother to utilize that power for games? It makes no sense. That's like buying a Ferrari just to drive to church every sunday.
I see a lot of comments already about how the Macs cost a lot..
Let me pose this question to those people then - with the recent changes in the industry, who is really paying more? The Mac users or the Windows users? Any high end card nowadays comes in PCI Express, which almost certainly requires you to buy a new motherboard, and possibly a new processor, on top of that $200-$400 card. Gaming definitely knows how to suck that money out of your wallet quicker than any Mac will.
Windows users are allowed to play more , but we pay the price for it. I suppose it's a necessary evil in order to enjoy gaming at its finest..
I read tons of geek message boards (go figure), as well as car enthusiast sites. I tune my Celica, read all kinds of boards, and I'm a CS student. So, I get to see the differences of the sub-cultures first hand. I have gearhead friends, and computer geek friends.
They are ONE IN THE SAME - believe me. The faster the better, and whoever has the best & biggest toys win.
You may write code or be an admin to prove to the world how smart you are. The tuner guys drive fast to prove to the world how fast they are.
The only difference between these two groups of people, is that they use different machines in seperate ways to express individuality & creativity. Otherwise, tuning a car properly, or maintaining a nice sized network / program are exactly the same thing.
To sum this article up :
So game publishers, stop overpromising. Let your games sell themselves, instead of your PR representatives. Have some faith in the developers talents, just like in the old days. Yes, your game may sell well, but when expectations aren't met you can expect the sequel not to do so well.
I'm suprised with the mention of all these games (San Andreas/HL2/Halo2/Doom3), not one of these people brought up anything about piracy, which has run rampant with 90% of the titles mentioned. I couldn't imagine having a more negative impact upon business then seeing your stolen, TOP SECRET, un-hyped product being passed around for free.
But then again, I suppose if a leak were controlled, it would be one hell of a PR stunt. Conspiracy theories, anyone?
7 hours is a bit excessive for anything (LOTR anyone?), but i'd probably still watch the whole thing.
I've sat & watched xmodem downloads for longer, dammit. At least all of us who used boards did gain one benefit from it - patience.
1. redial
2. connect
3. download, logoff at 11:59pm
4. redial @ 12:01am
5. connect
6. use fresh file credits for more downloading
7. play newly acquired 4mb shareware game
In case you guys don't understand the significance of RaD Man posting this story, he leads the ACiD artwork group. ACiD was the biggest, and best, ansi art group back in the day. They had distro's all over the world at one point, and if you had original ACiD art on your board, you were leet.
I miss the BBS days. There was something appealing to me about playing B.R.E, L.O.R.D, Barneysplat, posting FIDOnet messages, and trying to figure out ways to scam the upload/download credit system. Bulletin boards definately helped inspire some of the basic fundamental utilities we have on the internet today - message boards, games, file transfers, we had it all.
It really was some of the best times i've ever had with a computer, period. I'm only 24 and this is literally part of my childhood. I urge any old sysops, or anyone who is curious to check out the BBS Documentary website for more nostalgia & information.
708/312 repruhzent.
A credit to Jon Stewart.. he's a funny guy. But it really does say something about the current state of our media, when a satirical news show host is considered a political correspondant.
Although.. knowing the way my country works, I wouldn't be suprised if he becomes a governer, or the president, in less than 8 years. His running mate? Lewis Black.
They'd get my vote. We may as well have our kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.
...using Steam to get HL2 vs. buying it retail? If I recall correctly you can only get the package that includes the Source rework of HL1 via online purchase and I *really* want that, but I still don't like the idea of dropping $50 or so on a game and not getting anything physical to hang on to. I know it's old-fashioned, but I still like having a backup copy to hang on to just in case my drive dies or something.
Amen to the "I want tangible stuff" comment. Check out this post for a solution. Basically, you'll have to archive all of the \steamapps folder with winrar, and back it up on DVD/CD. About 2 1/2 DVD's or a fsckload of CD's are your options.
Terminology used when software is burned onto a "gold" cd that will be sent to the CD manufacturers to be reproduced. So named because of the CDR burnable CDs are gold backed normally. Also See Going Glass.
Taken from Gamedev.Net
..is all speculation. This is yesterdays news, and hasn't involved an official PR by Valve or Vivendi. As much as I would like this to be true, there aren't any facts to substantiate it.
Between playing CS:Source and reading the steampowered.com forums, I'd be amazed that it will be available for a November release.
There are tons of bugs, exploits, and cheats going around any CS:Source (HL2 powered) servers. IMHO, it looks like they really rushed CS out the door, and it's pissed off a lot of steam subscribers. I should only hope with the official gold announcement comes a big patch to address the many issues they've already got.
The Incredibles
I'm not sure if the above link is the same trailer, but it's still good. The two links submitted in the article aren't even pumping out 10kb/sec @ 8am on a sunday morning.
Well, with these kind of statistics, he'll be gainfully employed for years to come.
While he believes his job is important, Rush doesn't take the role of Internet cop too seriously. But he admits with a chuckle that his favorite computer game at the moment is called City of Heroes.
I'd sit back all day and play CoH, and tell my boss "Sure, I killed off 800 spammers today. But 30,000 more popped up. Guess I'll be seeing you monday."
I need me one of those gigs. Anyone offering?
I decided to check out Mozilla for the first time in quite some while.. I'm sitting here playing with font settings, not even 5 minutes in to the browser, and this story is listed.
Someone is trying to tell me something.
(begin opinionated rant)
The guy is going to cave over something like this? Fuck that, tell them to bring it.
What if it was a legitimate company? Software vendor? Would he still do the same, if he had received a death threat? If this gets to him, he obviously doesn't understand that doing business can result in ugliness like this. Still, I wouldn't let a taped note by an anonymous person dictate the way I conduct business. It's not like the man is running a web based puppy killing service, folks.
(end opinionated rant)
I'm not much of an original Star Trek fan, I was born in 1980.. But I've never seen such a positive response from slashdot for one single person like this. Honestly, i've seen a few trolls here and there, but people honestly do respect and treasure this man. Too bad Scotty can't read these slashdot postings. Good luck to him and his family, I'm sure we'll enjoy his prior work for years to come.
On a lighter note.. My favorite spoof of Star Trek, has to be this T-shirt I saw once. It had a B&D clad Vulcan woman on it, with the words "Beat me up, Scotty" right next to it. Good stuff. The writers of Trek were obviously on on to something good.. or at least, on something.
Can this be confirmed that the game has already been CRACKED before it's been released? Mod this guy up, if this isn't bullshit. I'd blow the points on you but i've already posted in the thread...
... that this isn't an indication of things to come. If you think about it, Steam's entire purpose is based off of bandwidth. Since we're all slashdotters, we're used to destroying a server to oblivion. Instead of the victim being some lowly tech page with a geeky story, this is Valve's bread & butter. It's pretty sad when they're already mired in demand over this pre-load, can you imagine opening day?
I stole the following link from bluesnews' forums, you may want to check it out as an alternative source of getting this HL2 load. Half Life 2 Cache Although, I have absolutely no idea how to inject this in to Steam, it may be an alternative for you bleeding edge gamers that have to have this NOW - even though you can't play it.
I'm torn between buying this at the store (If I can even get a copy) or getting the pre-load off of Steam (If they can even supply it). On top of all of this, I sure hope the actual servers they use for people activating CD keys on opening day is up to par. Otherwise, you're going to have a lot of pissed off gamers.
Supposed release date is September 2nd. I expect to see all of you there, or I will be confiscating geek status from you.
.. or it's been my complete ignorance of XP knowledge. For some strange reason, during SP2 installation, the installer would complain about atapi.sys being in use, and it couldn't backup the file. I figured "okay, probably an issue with a drive or virtual drive on my system". So, I uninstalled Daemon Tools/Nero/ Alcohol 120% (all of which use those virtual drives for emulation) and it still gave me the same error. Even in safe mode, windows refuses to give access to this file, citing that it's currently in use.
So, if you use any of the above mentioned programs, beware. This update will probably not bode well with the virtual devices on the system. You do have the option to skip the file, and continue the SP2 installation. It did go off without a hitch - besides finding that MSOBMAIN.DLL(read: M$ XP activation utility), is apparently corrupted and now i've got 16kb of bad sectors on my disk. Hearing two CLUNKS followed by my drive spinning up, isn't something I was welcoming during a service pack installation.
Although, SP2 does speed up explorer a little bit, and I've disabled all the annoying fud from the security center. It runs pretty good. No complaints.
Not looking for karma here, just warning you guys of a potential conflict if you're planning on rolling this out on your home machine. I don't think D-Tools/Nero/Alcohol 120% is used too often in a corporate environment.
Personally, I think it was a great game, with technology that will be in most if not all the games in the future.
Remember how many games have used the quake engine, too. At least a dozen come to mind. Even Half Life, as I understand it, uses a modified quake engine as it's base. I hope iD continues to make games, and set trends in the gaming industry. It's unfortunate that all of their titles have been first person shooters.. I think a genre change would definately garner success for them.
These games drive the hardware industry, as well. I specifically remember hearing something on the internet to the effect of - "Nvidia tailors their cards around what carmack wants in his toolbox." If that isn't influence, I don't know what is.
Any movie with Will Smith. I know he's got geek factor (he turned down MIT, as I understand it), but seriously.. he can't act.
Want a nice review of I, Robot? Check out the best page in the universe.
1) Will Smith
2) Explosions/Aliens/Robots
3) ????
4) PROFIT!!!
oops. this is what i get for hitting the submit instead of preview.. sorry :P
If you guys dig this, you may also get in to NPRQuake which takes quake 1, and turns it in to sketch art. It works on the shareware Q1 client, and doesn't require the amount of user intervention that this MS project does.
Still, it is an interesting concept.. and as I understand, the playstation2 is a huge seller. I had no idea there was such a market for this stuff.
Doesn't the original KaZaA client have it's own spyware? I don't see a reason to cry over someone robbing a company of spyware revenue in favor of their own spyware revenue. Now, if someone robs the client to remove the spyware altogether (like KaZaA Lite supposedly did), I'm all for that.
Kazaa came bundled with a client for BDE which was used to sell your spare cpu cycles to someone else. Basically like a huge distributed computing project, that the end user had absolutely no idea about.. I believe this single act kick-started the whole anti-adware/spyware movement.
I'd recommend using KazaaLite K++, which has removed all of the extra FUD. Although, good luck finding a legitimate download. 98% of the files on Kazaa are fakes, planted by the RIAA to dissuade you from downloading music. In the end, it is not going to matter what client you use, if all of the files on the network are bogus.
I'm not one to nitpick, but perhaps the reason you've been bombarded with spam is the fact that you freely post your email address without any sort of protection.
:)
For example.. lets say my address is monkey@asdfgbe.com. A bot would be able to pick this up in a heartbeat, (they use google, as well as search various news sites such as slashdot) and add me to a spam list. Now, had I chose monkey@@@asdfgbe.c o m, a spam script would have a problem parsing that as a real address, and it would be rejected. Do you get what I'm saying?
I also notice that your page has a direct link to another email address, you may want to append the same junk characters to that, to circumvent the junk email. You should check in the slashdot options under the comment section, and select "show your email address with random SPAM-armoring applied (this changes weekly)".
Mod me OT if you wish, I'm trying to help this guy understand the fundamentals of how some spam actually works.
Oh, and yes, thunderbird is the greatest.